Patrick Manning – USA

We are shaped, imperceptibly, by voids and absences. We are formed by silence. Patrick’s work explores how language, mark making, erasure, loss, and silence inhabit our relationships to the wider environment and to one
another. He photographs human-made marks in the landscape as proxies for loss. Partick images how power is used in photographs to ignore and
subjugate. He narrates the silences that form our relationships.
Patrick works across media: painting, photographing, videoing, collages,
drawing on photographs, fabricating public art sculptures. He images
landscapes undergoing human caused change, rework pornographic images and portraits of high school athletes. He draws on the surface of photographs taken by a serial killer and video my family. Patrick paints portraits of faces that never existed. But it is all the same thing. He is manufacturing shadows, echoes, ghosts. He makes reverberations. He works back and forth across the edge of blindness. He seeks to reveal what cannot be seen and to erase what is visible. He makes visible, momentarily, the act of stepping across the threshold. It is in the liminal moment between what is, and what is not, that he wants the work to hover.
A curator once said ”Your work describes our fall from grace.” It does. It
marks where we are destroying, defacing, and desecrating. But, It also marks where we are making, marking, and manufacturing. Patrick seeks the beauty and sublime in those intersections. Patrick is fascinated by the beauty of our moving forward through an eternal fall from a grace we never attained.